Aylmer lunged out.
The point reached and entered the boar's flank. It squealed savagely, turned, blundered, and fell beneath the horse's hoofs. Aylmer felt the shock, the agonizing effort at recovery, the final thud of the fall. The horse tripped and rolled over; the spear was torn from the rider's grip. Aylmer ploughed a groove in the sand which landed him far out beyond the huddle of flying limbs in which the white tusks were already working viciously.
He scrambled first to his knees and then to his feet. He looked around. The child was close to him, running now towards him. His hands were outstretched; he gave little panting cries.
And then Aylmer experienced that curious cold sense of relaxation which comes to some men when the situation calls for instant effort. He saw the child; he saw also the boar, slashing relentlessly a way out from the tangle of his horse's legs; he saw the horsewoman whose reins were tightening not twenty yards away. But here was no cause for hesitation or bewilderment. His mind, to himself, worked with a certain sense of leisure. He stooped, caught up the child, placed him in the woman's arms, and gave her horse a thrust of dismissal with his fist. As the flying hoofs scattered the sand upon his tunic, he turned to confront his own plight without fear, with, indeed, nothing less than relief. The absorbing objective of the last two minutes being achieved, his mind had not had time to review and interpret his own danger.
The boar shook itself free of entanglement, snapped around at the wound in its flank, swayed a little and suddenly, malignantly, focussed its gaze upon Aylmer. It gave a grunt of satisfaction, as it seemed. As if the tension of a hidden spring was released, it bounded forward.
Aylmer looked at it as one looks at, and appraises, a picture. The sense of his own peril was in his mind, but latently. He understood the consequences if the boar reached him, but, owing to some perverse enravelment of the brain, details absorbed him to the veiling of all else. He noted with what excellent effect the crimson smear upon the dark flank shone out against the dull background of the sand. He recognized the abnormal curl of the tusks, and debated to what angle the jaw must be slanted to deliver the ripping undercut which experience told him he would receive within a couple of seconds. He saw with a pang of regret that the shaft of his spear was broken; the splintered end protruded from below the withers of the still struggling horse. Thus the picture—which engrossed him.
And then it was gone, blotted out. The thunder of hoofs, a rising cloud of sand, a dark, struggling mass, which was the boar upon its back. The rider whom he had distanced had passed and the spear had got home. Red was the central spot of this picture, also, but no longer on the dark flank. It welled from the dying animal's chest in torrents.
As he watched its struggles, the sense of hazard escaped came home to him. Fear found room in his brain. He ran towards the broken spear, grasped it, turned to confront a peril which no longer menaced.
A shudder shook the swaying body, the great thews relaxed. The boar panted violently—once—twice. Then with a single sigh, very gently, very languidly, it sank upon the earth. And so lay still.
As he stood staring down at it, a reaction against his tinge of panic moved Aylmer to laughter. He began to giggle in little bubbling gasps of mirth which were near relations of hysteria. Matters had gone so quickly that his sense of proportion had been displaced. First perfect equanimity, then sudden and unfounded apprehension, now recoil. One short minute had made ample room for all these among his emotions. He found laughter the only balm to his self-respect, for he was shivering with a Briton's uneasy sense of having been guilty of melodrama.